TC Energy's Virginia Reliability Project Gets FERC Approval

Appalachian natural gas producers got good news earlier this month: Williams announced it was moving forward with the Southeast Supply Enhancement project, a large-scale expansion of southbound capacity out of the Northeast on its Transco Pipeline system. Not only that, but it super-sized the project to 1.4 Bcf/d of capacity — nearly double the 800 MMcf/d it had offered in an open season held this summer. The project is one of several brownfield expansions planned to provide additional supply access in Transco’s premium Zone 5 market area, which runs through Virginia and North Carolina — and the first large-scale takeaway expansion to be announced in the area since the long-delayed Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) was cleared for completion following years of regulatory and legal hurdles. In today’s RBN blog, we provide the latest on the Transco Corridor expansions.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) and planned expansions to it and the Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line (Transco) system are providing utilities, data centers and others in Virginia and the Carolinas with enhanced access to Marcellus/Utica-sourced natural gas — and man, will they need it! Plans for new generating capacity between Washington, DC and the South Carolina/Georgia state line are proliferating, and the increasing ability to move large volumes of gas south on MVP and Transco will give producers in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio an important incremental outlet for their gas well into the 2030s. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll discuss the boom in power demand in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina and the very timely expansion of gas-pipeline access to three states. 

It took an “Act of Congress” and a decision from the highest court in the land — handed down by the Chief Justice no less — but it’s looking more and more like Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) will be completed as early as by the end of this year, opening up 2 Bcf/d of new takeaway capacity for the increasingly pipeline-constrained Appalachian gas supply basin. That’s shifted the industry’s gaze to bottlenecks downstream of where the bulk of the volumes flowing on the new pipeline will land — on the doorstep of Williams’s Transco Pipeline in southern Virginia. A number of midstream expansions have been announced to capture the influx of natural gas supply from MVP and shuttle it to downstream markets in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast regions, and indications are that more will be announced and greenlighted in the coming months. These projects will be key to both enabling gas production growth in the Appalachia basin as well as meeting growing gas demand in the premium markets lying on the other side of the constraints. In today’s RBN blog, we delve into the details and timing of the announced expansion projects vying to increase market access to MVP supply.